Project Member

The project aimed to document the phonetic structures of Onya Darat by collecting a series of aero-acoustic recordings.

The Onya Darat are a Dayak group living in the Ketapang regency of the Indonesian province of Kalimantan Barat. Historically, members of the group were hunter-gatherers who also engaged in limited swidden agriculture and animal husbandry. The Onya Darat language is the southernmost member of Land Dayak (also known as Bidayuhic), a group of languages spoken over a vast area in the interior of western Borneo. The main dialects of Onya Darat are Kualan, Samandang, Baram, and Simpang. Land Dayak languages belong to the Austronesian family and are clearly part of the Western Malayo-Polynesian branch, but their exact position within this group is yet to be determined. It is one of the least-studied groups in the Austronesian language family, and the entire body of academic literature on it consists of a handful of articles and dictionaries and one descriptive book about the Bidayuh language (Rensch et al. 2012). The only academic publication thus far on Onya Darat is a short article on its orthography (Tadmor 2009).